Friday, 16 January 2015

Our January Selections

Our January Selections

Theme: Member's Choice

Dear Members,

Thank you to everyone who have submitted their titles for this month's Member's Choice theme, where everyone gets to pick any title from the fiction or non-fiction genre. The result is a surprise: we pick these titles out of a hat and off we go!

Without further ado, here are the selections:

My Choice:

Summary: After witnessing the
death of his younger brother in a terrible home accident, 14-year-old
Kevin and his grieving mother are sent for the summer to live with
Kevin's grandfather. In this peeled-paint coal town deep in Appalachia,
Kevin quickly falls in with a half-wild hollow kid named Buzzy Fink who
schools him in the mysteries and magnificence of the woods. The events
of this fateful summer will affect the entire town of Medgar, Kentucky.

Medgar
is beset by a massive Mountaintop Removal operation that is blowing up
the hills and back filling the hollows. Kevin's grandfather and others
in town attempt to rally the citizens against the 'company' and its
powerful owner to stop the plunder of their mountain heritage. When
Buzzy witnesses the brutal murder of the opposition leader, a sequence
is set in play which tests Buzzy and Kevin to their absolute limits in
an epic struggle for survival in the Kentucky mountains.

Redemptive and emotionally resonant, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
is narrated by an adult Kevin looking back on the summer when he
sloughed the coverings of a boy and took his first faltering steps as a
man among a rich cast of characters and an ambitious effort to reclaim a
once great community.

Shirley's Choice:

Summary: The official book behind the film, The Imitation Game, this is
a dramatic portrayal of the life and work of Alan Turing, one of
Britain's most extraordinary unsung heroes, and one of the world's
greatest innovators.
This is the official story that has inspired the British film, The Imitation Game,
a nail-biting race against time following Alan Turing, the pioneer of
modern-day computing and credited with cracking the German Enigma code,
and his brilliant team at Britain's top-secret code-breaking centre,
Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of World War II. Turing, whose
contributions and genius significantly shortened the war, saving
thousands of lives, was the eventual victim of an unenlightened British
establishment, but his work and legacy live on.
Prime Minister
Gordon Brown released a statement of apology in 2009 on behalf of the
British government for the "appalling" treatment of Turing.

Sonya's Choice:

Summary: Despite their many
differences, Detective Rachel Getty trusts her boss, Esa Khattak,
implicitly. But she’s still uneasy at Khattak’s tight-lipped secrecy
when he asks her to look into Christopher Drayton’s death. Drayton’s
apparently accidental fall from a cliff doesn’t seem to warrant a police
investigation, particularly not from Rachel and Khattak’s team, which
handles minority-sensitive cases. But when she learns that Drayton may
have been living under an assumed name, Rachel begins to understand why
Khattak is tip-toeing around this case. It soon comes to light that
Drayton may have been a war criminal with ties to the Srebrenica
massacre of 1995.

If that’s true, any number of people might have
had reason to help Drayton to his death, and a murder investigation
could have far-reaching ripples throughout the community. But as Rachel
and Khattak dig deeper into the life and death of Christopher Drayton,
every question seems to lead only to more questions, with no easy
answers. Had the specters of Srebrenica returned to haunt Drayton at the
end, or had he been keeping secrets of an entirely different nature?
Or, after all, did a man just fall to his death from the Bluffs?

In
her spellbinding debut, Ausma Zehanat Khan has written a complex and
provocative story of loss, redemption, and the cost of justice that will
linger with readers long after turning the final page.

Lauren's Choice:

Summary: The epic,
unforgettable story of a man determined to protect the woman he loves
from the town desperate to destroy her—this beautiful and devastating
debut heralds the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.

Ephram Jennings has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long
braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East
Texas town. Young Ruby, “the kind of pretty it hurt to look at,” has
suffered beyond imagining, so as soon as she can, she flees suffocating
Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York. Ruby quickly winds her
way into the ripe center of the city--the darkened piano bars and hidden
alleyways of the Village--all the while hoping for a glimpse of the red
hair and green eyes of her mother. When a telegram from her cousin
forces her to return home, thirty-year-old Ruby Bell finds herself
reliving the devastating violence of her girlhood. With the terrifying
realization that she might not be strong enough to fight her way back
out again, Ruby struggles to survive her memories of the town’s dark
past. Meanwhile, Ephram must choose between loyalty to the sister who
raised him and the chance for a life with the woman he has loved since
he was a boy.

Full of life, exquisitely written, and suffused with the pastoral beauty of the rural South, Ruby
is a transcendent novel of passion and courage. This wondrous
page-turner rushes through the red dust and gossip of Main Street, to
the pit fire where men swill bootleg outside Bloom’s Juke, to Celia
Jennings’s kitchen where a cake is being made, yolk by yolk, that Ephram
will use to try to begin again with Ruby. Utterly transfixing, with
unforgettable characters, riveting suspense, and breathtaking, luminous
prose, Ruby offers an unflinching portrait of man’s dark acts and the promise of the redemptive power of love.

Barbara's Choice:

Summary: The Handmaid's Tale meets The Hunger Games in this brilliantly imagined debut set in an ancient culture where only the queen may breed and deformity means death.

Flora
717 is a sanitation worker, a member of the lowest caste in her orchard
hive where work and sacrifice are the highest virtues and worship of
the beloved Queen the only religion. But Flora is not like other bees.
With circumstances threatening the hive's survival, her curiosity is
regarded as a dangerous flaw but her courage and strength are an asset.
She is allowed to feed the newborns in the royal nursery and then to
become a forager, flying alone and free to collect pollen. She also
finds her way into the Queen's inner sanctum, where she discovers
mysteries about the hive that are both profound and ominous.

But
when Flora breaks the most sacred law of all—daring to challenge the
Queen's fertility—enemies abound, from the fearsome fertility police who
enforce the strict social hierarchy to the high priestesses jealously
wedded to power. Her deepest instincts to serve and sacrifice are now
overshadowed by an even deeper desire, a fierce maternal love that will
bring her into conflict with her conscience, her heart, her society—and
lead her to unthinkable deeds.

Thrilling, suspenseful and spectacularly imaginative, The Bees gives us a dazzling young heroine and will change forever the way you look at the world outside your window

Kristin's Choice:

Summary: In the winter of 1953,
Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking,
she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in
New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his
winsome daughter, Snow Whitman.

A wicked stepmother is a creature
Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of
aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s
daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as
light-skinned African Americans passing for white. Among them, Boy,
Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power
surfaces really hold.

Dazzlingly inventive and powerfully moving, Boy, Snow, Bird
is an astonishing and enchanting novel. With breathtaking feats of
imagination, Helen Oyeyemi confirms her place as one of the most
original and dynamic literary voices of our time.

JoAnne's Choice:

Summary:

In Punishment,
his first novel since completing his Long Stretch trilogy, Scotiabank
Giller-winner Linden MacIntyre brings us a powerful exploration of
justice and vengeance, and the peril that ensues when passion replaces
reason, in a small town shaken by a tragic death.

Forced
to retire early from his job as a corrections officer in Kingston
Penitentiary, Tony Breau has limped back to the village where he grew up
to lick his wounds, only to find that Dwayne Strickland, a young con
he’d had dealings with in prison is back there too–and once again in
trouble. Strickland has just been arrested following the suspicious
death of a teenage girl, the granddaughter of Caddy Stewart, Tony’s
first love.

Tony
is soon caught in a fierce emotional struggle between the outcast
Strickland and the still alluring Caddy. And then another figure from
Tony’s past, the forceful Neil Archie MacDonald - just retired in murky
circumstances from the Boston police force -stokes the community’s anger
and suspicion and an irresistible demand for punishment. As Tony
struggles to resist the vortex of vigilante action, Punishment builds
into a total page-turner that blindsides you with twists and betrayals.Jennifer's Choice:

Summary: As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself visiting its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia—“the most dangerous place on earth.” On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road. Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda survives on memory—every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity—and on strategy, fortitude, and hope. When she is most desperate, she visits a house in the sky, high above the woman kept in chains, in the dark.

Eric's Choice:

Summary: A debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives.

Rachel
takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down
the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at
the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting
on their deck. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. “Jess and
Jason,” she calls them. Their life—as she sees it—is perfect. Not
unlike the life she recently lost.

And then she sees something
shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough.
Now everything’s changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel offers
what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what
happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done
more harm than good?A compulsively readable, emotionally immersive, Hitchcockian thriller that draws comparisons to Gone Girl, The Silent Wife, or Before I Go to Sleep, this is an electrifying debut embraced by readers across markets and categories.

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About Me

The Matchbook Book Club meets once a month in various locations in Toronto. We strive to look at books that matter, stirs the heart, and provide a deep understanding of our world, with a selection of titles to "match" a theme every month. We host fun and interesting outings that coincides with what the book club aspires to be: defining what we think and imagine through old world charisma in modern times. In the words of Mark Twain: "Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."